At 10 PM eastern, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting The Man in the White Suit with Alec Guiness. Anyone interest in economics should watch it (I have the DVD recorder set.)

One reason I am so pessimistic about getting out of this economic mess is because I think its root go much deeper than Greenspan and company giving bankers a green light to gamble. Reckless lending is symptomatic of being too few people who are likely to pay the money back (note that if they bankers didn't understand this, they would not have pushed so hard to prevent restructuring of credit card and mortgage debt during bankruptcy).

The reason the economy has become so dependent on debt financing to fuel the demand side is because median incomes have been shrinking (real growth means that purchasing power must grow, which is why supply side economics is deflationary). Ultimately, this is a failure of the mythology that when good jobs are lost to increased productivity (or outsourcing) they will be replaced by better jobs. This simply has not happened (other than all those smoke and mirrors jobs in the finance and real estate industries).